I have to run out the door now, or I'd write more. But this has a lot of balance stuff, and the start of some interface stuff. It helps make the top bar a little cleaner and clearer, and the services and whatnot overview is coming in the next couple of days. The bottom bar has an empty hole at the moment where science was, but the bottom bar and the left bar are both going to be combined very soon into a bottom-left section. The art is all done (mock-out style), so it just needs to get coded. Very excited about that, it's way more usable I think.

Must run. Enjoy!

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Note: This post contains content that is meant to be whimsical. Any belittlement or trivialization of complex issues is only intended to lighten the mood and does not reflect upon the merit of those positions.

Allright, after having started on it, ehhh.... either I"m seriously missing something, or this game is agreeing with me far less than ever.

The early game is... slower than it's ever been. I"m not even entirely paying attention, frankly. There's nothing happening, and more than half of my time is spent clicking on the "next turn" button while I wait for the population numbers to VERY VERY VERY SLOWLY go up (and the birth rate hasnt gone up AT ALL, even after the thousand years it took to get a hostpital up and running, which makes no logical sense. Higher population with a birth rate never rising is... very unintuitive and confusing; I could easily see alot of players looking at this and genuinely believing they've run into a major glitch) so that buildings start functioning. Not to mention the dirt-slow acquisition of money, too (what happened to banks and stuff?)... And the early-game still has the problem it's had from the very start, in that it feels like a city builder where nothing ever happens and nothing moves. At this point, I'd actually like to just skip this part of the game. It's just.... nothing's going on. Nothing ever occurs.

I havent found myself using any strategy this time around... moreso just "Is this thing needed? If yes, place it now, just wherever. If no, just sit here, click the end turn button some more." That buildings are placed so rarely now isnt helping.

Tech tree still feels meaningless, as before I'm just clicking on.... whatever. I'm not even looking at it entirely half the time. Though, again, I say this about literally every tech tree in every single 4X game I've ever played, in that I just click on whatever's "next" based on the numbers; frankly, I hate the mechanic as a whole, absolutely cant stand it, so this one isnt the fault of this game, definitely not. Though it's worse right now since the vast majority of turns are spent not doing anything, so it just doesnt matter at all what order techs come in.... because they're going to sit there never being used anyway.

The interface.... what happened here? Most of the info is missing. Is there a way to bring that full display back up?

For now, I'm just going to stop.... I honestly just cant focus on this. I didn't last very long with it before reaching that point. I'm very bad with games that have stretches where I'm not doing anything (which is a huge part of why I dont play games that have storylines much, because cutscenes involve me not doing anything... I'm getting that same sort of feeling here, just without the cutscenes). It's just.... way, way, WAY too slow.

Hm, surely there's got to be something I'm missing?

And I'm just playing on normal settings by the way, in territories with normal difficulty. I didn't change any defaults.

Allright, after having started on it, ehhh.... either I"m seriously missing something, or this game is agreeing with me far less than ever.

The early game is... slower than it's ever been. I"m not even entirely paying attention, frankly. There's nothing happening, and more than half of my time is spent clicking on the "next turn" button while I wait for the population numbers to VERY VERY VERY SLOWLY go up (and the birth rate hasnt gone up AT ALL, even after the thousand years it took to get a hostpital up and running, which makes no logical sense. Higher population with a birth rate never rising is... very unintuitive and confusing; I could easily see alot of players looking at this and genuinely believing they've run into a major glitch) so that buildings start functioning. Not to mention the dirt-slow acquisition of money, too (what happened to banks and stuff?)...

Tech tree still feels meaningless, as before I'm just clicking on.... whatever. I'm not even looking at it entirely half the time. Though, again, I say this about literally every tech tree in every single 4X game I've ever played, in that I just click on whatever's "next" based on the numbers; frankly, I hate the mechanic as a whole, absolutely cant stand it, so this one isnt the fault of this game, definitely not. Though it's worse right now since the vast majority of turns are spent not doing anything, so it just doesnt matter at all what order techs come in.... because they're going to sit there never being used anyway.

The interface.... what happened here? Most of the info is missing. Is there a way to bring that full display back up?.

Hm, surely there's got to be something I'm missing?

And I'm just playing on normal settings by the way, in territories with normal difficulty. I didn't change any defaults.

1 usually they go up for me although id have to test that persificly to be sure.

2 I honestly don't share your problem with money being slow for me I actually make way to much currency to the point were I build what ever I need without issue.

3 I think I have to agree when I'm researching things I'm actually interested in using its fine but then I find my self researching things just because there there don't know what to do about that honestly. (I think it would be nice to have an option to turn of the forced tech picking so I can ignore tech when there's nothing I want/need at that current point of time or in the foreseeable future)

4 I think the idea is to keep things out that you don't need to pay attention to all the time although personally I would like things like and water and so on put back up there perhaps even implement a sort of (for lack of a better word) key bindings system to allow you choose what persifick statistics you want to show up there and what you just want to come up as a need when you well need more of it.

The early game is [slow]...population [growth is slow]...economy [growth is slow]...tech tree [is meaningless]...The interface [lost information][Juffo-Wup fills my fibers and I grow turgid. Violence ensues.]

The v3 changes have removed a lot of the micro and well as limited the player's ability to expand. Early game is slow for most races, unless you build small shops fairly extensively. The other basic economic buildings (lumber camp, fishery) aren't really viable. Many races have problems getting to the first cloning center, and the game doesn't pick up until then. Given the lack of building placement relevance it does seem like whack-a-mole [problem]. The events are intended to fill that void, but they aren't complete yet. In that note it seems like SBR is aiming for something like King of Dragon Pass, but the event depth is too shall. The events are effectively random noise right now. As for the techtree, each time I'm prompted, I just queue up everything on the short list and forget about them, I get things when they finish. So I agree with most of the content of Misery's view. I'm guessing he picked an awkward starting race and didn't focus on small shops, but the general consensus of his post isn't inaccurate.

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Note: This post contains content that is meant to be whimsical. Any belittlement or trivialization of complex issues is only intended to lighten the mood and does not reflect upon the merit of those positions.

The early game is [slow]...population [growth is slow]...economy [growth is slow]...tech tree [is meaningless]...The interface [lost information][Juffo-Wup fills my fibers and I grow turgid. Violence ensues.]

The v3 changes have removed a lot of the micro and well as limited the player's ability to expand. Early game is slow for most races, unless you build small shops fairly extensively. The other basic economic buildings (lumber camp, fishery) aren't really viable. Many races have problems getting to the first cloning center, and the game doesn't pick up until then. Given the lack of building placement relevance it does seem like whack-a-mole [problem]. The events are intended to fill that void, but they aren't complete yet. In that note it seems like SBR is aiming for something like King of Dragon Pass, but the event depth is too shall. The events are effectively random noise right now. As for the techtree, each time I'm prompted, I just queue up everything on the short list and forget about them, I get things when they finish. So I agree with most of the content of Misery's view. I'm guessing he picked an awkward starting race and didn't focus on small shops, but the general consensus of his post isn't inaccurate.

I just started with the Krolin, since they're chosen by default, and I went into this not really knowing what's going on. It was made apparent almost immediately that the small shops were the central source of money in the beginning, but.... there's nobody to run them! Population went up by exactly 13 every turn.... no matter what I did. I figured that the increment would get larger as the population size increased.... more people having more kids and all.... but it never moved! Population kept rising by that amount, and that amount never changed. I saw that a hospital was meant to be an early game method of increasing it, so I built one, which took 20 damn turns (and most of these turns didn't contain anything for me to do, because the numbers werent there to do them with).... and the number went up by a whole FIVE. This didn't exactly do much to speed things up.

This.... was baffling. And slow. And since the placement of buildings... at least at this earliest point (does this change?) seems pretty meaningless (I just stuck them wherever, it didn't seem to matter much), that just makes even that bit uninteresting.

Not to mention that the tech tree's speed does NOT seem to match this. For example, in not long at all, even if you get a bunch of other techs first when you dont need to, you can unlock that business office thing. Takes, what, 300 people to run it, yeah? But when you get it, even if you took some extra time getting other techs first... you're not anywhere NEAR the point of it being practical or viable. It's like the pace of the game was entirely distorted.... but the pace of the tech tree wasnt changed whatsoever. It's very disjointed, from what I've seen of it.

Now, I'm not exactly the grand master of strategy games here... so my own opinion probably isnt all that important, and might not match up with what others are currently thinking about the game. But, that's exactly why I'm asking about this, to see if I'm missing anything major here, because that's kinda the feeling I get. Like, this whole thing just is not at all working right... so something's gotta be off, and I just cant tell for sure if I'm just not spotting something, or if there's a genuine balance/pacing/whatever issue going on right now.

What I do know is that, by my own viewpoint, I can see alot of potential players getting very, very caught up on this aspect. Starting the game, but just losing interest because there's nothing to do, nothing happening.

I mean, I can get the idea of the events, but... even those cant possibly do all that much, because one way or another.... your actions are still *very* slow. All I can see them doing is forcing choices on you that you otherwise wouldnt make. Like, okay, I'm building up population so I can place this linguistics thing, because I know I need it, and building up money, just let it do this for about 12 more turns, aaaaaand.... oh, wait, Godzilla is here, now I *have* to divert from that to place this extremely specific building to deal with him... and now the rest of everything I had to do is just delayed.

I mean, that early on, it's not like you're going to be trying to come up with a group of interesting building placements and changes to make to solve problems, because you can barely make any moves to begin with. There's just no ability to do so. If the events were firing off right now.... this would be even slower.

Really, it's that population thing that is just killing the entire thing for me. It just... it drags it to a near halt.

We have a discussion going on economy there. I also give a basic build order that will help jump start your economy. It requires a little bit of micro and you do need to know when to put construction crews down in your main territory to speed up buildings.